Back Home Just in Time for the Economic Collapse Links

* My old friend Julie takes the critical thinking skills she honed on the Randolph High School debate team and takes them to the Center for American Progress with a piece on the war on diversity education.

The final section of Pratt’s collection calls on us to transcend our economic predicaments. “Street of Broken Dreams” delves into the mortgage crisis: “No way to tell who owns my neighborhood homes/ until the for-sale-by-bank signs grow overnight.” It is a poem that celebrates the people who resisted their neighborhood home foreclosures, ending with their imagined chants: “We demand. Not rabble and rabid, not shadow, not terror,/ the neighbors stand and say: The world is ours, ours, ours.”

* Also in breaking Jaimee news: her pop culture icons will be hanging in Bean Trader’s on 9th Street starting August 1.

Asian stock markets fell Thursday as uncertainty over the U.S. debt ceiling debate continued to weigh market sentiment, while concerns over a stronger yen dragged exporters in Tokyo.

“The scary part of the story is the fact that markets have not priced-in the U.S. defaulting on its debt. Should the unthinkable happen in the next week then a throw back to the chaos of 2008 would again become a reality,” said CMC Markets analyst Ben Le Brun. “Should the majority of opinion be correct and the U.S. does avoid a default, global markets do appear as if they are positioned for a relief rally of sorts. Until then investors should brace themselves for more pain.”

3 Responses

So graduate students will be faced with a triple whammy: 1) give up substantial income to be a full time student 2) take out student loans that you have to pay to back (or at least pay interest) prior to accruing any true benefit and 3) pay a higher rate on those loans because all borrowing costs more in post-default or (somewhat optimistically) post-almost-default America.

At least #1 is avoided if you didn’t have a job to give up in the first place. What kind of economic stimulus is it where we encourage less-skilled workers to stay less-skilled? I wonder how much the economy will suffer when loads of 20-30 year old graduate students are given the choice of paying back $1000+ in interest or otherwise buying tangible goods and services.

…not to mention the prospect of full-scale system failure when a large portion of the millennial generation proves incapable of paying back their student debt. I’m guessing the buzzword will be “generational default.” It’s a mess and only getting worse.

Student loan debt overtakes credit card debt for the first time in 2010. The response: let’s make credit debt seem lesser by further increasing “good” student loan debt. Is it a bubble if we trade shed-able debt for the kind that can only haunt you forever?